1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to telecommunications services. More particularly, the present invention relates to capabilities that enhance substantially the value and usefulness of various communication paradigms including, inter alia, Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Message Service (MMS), Internet Protocol (IP) Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), Electronic Mail (E-Mail), Instant Messaging (IM), etc.
2. Background of the Invention
As the ‘wireless revolution’ continues to march forward through various flavors of 2G, 3G, 4G, and beyond, the importance to a Mobile Subscriber (MS)—for example a user of a Wireless Device (WD) that is serviced by possibly inter alia a Wireless Carrier (WC)—of their WD grows substantially. Examples of WDs include, possibly inter alia, mobile telephones, handheld computers, Internet-enabled phones, pagers, radios, TVs, audio devices, car audio (and other) systems, recorders, text-to-speech devices, bar-code scanners, net appliances, mini-browsers, personal data assistants (PDAs), etc.
One consequence of such a growing importance is the resulting ubiquitous nature of WDs—i.e., MSs carry them at almost all times and use them for an ever-increasing range of activities. For example, MSs employ their WDs to, possibly inter alia.
1) Exchange messages with other MSs (e.g., “Let's meet for dinner at 6”) through Peer-to-Peer, or P2P, messaging.
2) Secure information (such as, for example, weather updates, travel alerts, news updates, sports scores, etc.), participate in voting initiatives (such as, for example, with the television show American Idol®), interact with social networking sites, etc. through various of the available Application-to-Peer, or A2P, based service offerings.
3) Engage in Mobile Commerce (which, broadly speaking, encompasses the buying and selling of merchant-supplied products, goods, and services through a WD) and Mobile Banking (which, broadly speaking, encompasses performing various banking activities through a WD).
Coincident with the rapid growth of WDs has been the desire of WCs, and other entities within a mobile ecosystem, to offer to MSs a continuing stream of new and interesting products and services that, possibly inter alia, attract new MSs and retain existing MSs, leverage or exploit the continually increasing features and capabilities of new WDs, incrementally increase the volume of messaging traffic (and the revenue that is associated with same) that flows through a mobile ecosystem, etc.
Implementation of the various product/service offerings that were referenced above may raise a host of processing, routing, performance, billing, etc. issues which an existing telecommunication infrastructure, which may have originated during the days of voice-only landline communication and which may have evolved incrementally over time to handle aspects of wireless communication, may be incapable of handling and which, as a consequence of the resulting void, may impact or preclude the delivery of such products or services.
Aspects of the present invention fills the lacuna that was noted above by (1) providing enhanced communication processing capabilities through among other things an Advanced IP Messaging Server (AIMS) facility that among other things may leverage various pools of data (e.g., routing data, location and presence data, MS profile data, etc.) to expeditiously process and route a wide range of information (including conventional SMS, MMS, etc. messaging; Voice Over IP [VoIP] and other data streams; Session Initiation Protocol [SIP]-addressed artifacts; etc.) while (2) addressing, in new and innovatory ways, various of the not insubstantial challenges that are associated with same.